Blood Diamond: Critic Reviews

There is every reason to learn about the link between jewels and death, by all means, but no reason to try to disguise a term paper as entertainment.

The makers this exceptionally foolish thriller starring a most excellent Leonardo DiCaprio, want you to know there may be blood on your hands, specifically your wedding finger.

The whole thing is more Gerald Ratner than Harry Winston.

Blood Diamond is a gem in a season with lots of worthy movies.

For its flaws, Blood Diamond is a gem, if only for being an unusually smart, engaged popcorn flick.

Blood Diamond wears both its social conscience and its Hollywood calculation on its sleeve. The movie wants to rouse you to action while narcotizing you with Connelly's bottomless green eyes.

The only indignation stirred up by Blood Diamond won't be among those who worry about where their jewelry came from, but with audiences incensed by facile politics and bad storytelling.

Blood Diamond is, in the vernacular of Old Hollywood, a rip-roaring adventure, the kind made in the '30s with Clark Gable and the handiest leading lady on contract at MGM.

Thanks to Mr. DiCaprio's raffishly dashing soldier of fortune, the movie is worth watching.

Blood Diamond was directed by Edward Zwick, a staunchly mainstream filmmaker who seems most at ease with the language of epic storytelling. If you're in the market for sweep or machismo, he's your man.

What keeps you watching is the level of acting, especially between the two male leads.

In balancing its major motion picture ambitions with thoughtful intentions, this compelling, neo-message movie offers a fresh T-shirt motto for the ongoing campaigns against diamonds that help finance corruption and slaughter: Do the Right Bling.

Both excitingly well made and dispiritingly formulaic.

Essentially a romantic adventure story with politics in the background -- an old-fashioned movie, I suppose, but exciting and stunningly well made.

Blood Diamond is a work of amazingly orchestrated chaos.

Blood Diamond is a visually sumptuous, bullet-train-paced thriller with a really provocative theme.

Action-adventure pictures have a lamentable tendency toward mindlessness, but Edward Zwick's epic story has numerous virtues apart from suspense and spectacle.

Africa has long been exploited by the West: for ivory, for gold, for diamonds, for oil. And, more recently, for, and by, Hollywood.

Perhaps the goofiest message movie ever made.

Blood Diamond loses its way at times, but the power and tragedy of civil war, of greed and tainted motives, is undeniable.

Blood Diamond deserves kudos for shedding light on the dark underbelly of the diamond trade, but it's too accomplished an action film to have the impact of, say, Hotel Rwanda or even this year's Catch a Fire.

Blood Diamond is never dull.

It is clearly one of the biggest surprises of this overcrowded holiday season, and certainly one of the most emotionally rousing entertainments of the year.

Africa's enduring sorrow is ripe for drama, but Blood Diamond is, finally, a fitting metaphor for the gems: Potentially brilliant from a distance, but upon closer inspection, one likely will see the flaws.

Action and message cancel each other out. To put it another way, this movie wants you to be appalled by the real slaughter of Africans by Africans - which it blames on you - but be entertained by the slaughter of Africans by DiCaprio.